A Gentle Plea for Chaos

by Mirabel Osler

Overview

In this book the author describes the way her garden evolved and how, without meaning to do so, she let it take over her life. She suggests moving away from planning, regimentation and gardening with the mentality of a stamp-collector. Frequently funny and always stimulating, she writes of the alchemy of gardens, of the 19th-century plant-collectors and plant illustrators and of the gardening philosophers, all fertilizing great thoughts along with their hollyhocks. She won the 1988 Sinclair Consumer Press Garden Writer of the Year Award.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781408837139
Publisher:	Bloomsbury USA
Publication date:	08/31/2012
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	192
Sales rank:	197,856
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Mirabel Osler is the critically acclaimed author of A Breath from Elsewhere and the classic A Gentle Plea for Chaos. She lives in Shropshire.

Editorial Reviews

This lush reverie by one of Britain's most beloved garden writers is not about flowers or vegetables or soil or pruning. It is, rather, about gardening in its widest and most imaginative sense. For Osler (In the Eye of the Garden, etc.), a garden is recreation for the mind, and garden thoughts lead down ever-branching paths. Here, the structuring elements of the author's gardentrees, water, stone walls, roses and bulbsserve as inspiration for many unexpected topics. The trees and pond lead to transporting descriptions of spare, open Chinese gardens and richly planted Mogul enclosures, of forgotten garden saints and botanist priests, as well as 19th-century plant collectors who braved exotic worlds. "Longing for a little shambles here and there" in her garden, Osler fashions her prose with engaging abandonskipping nimbly from her passion for pond creatures to her disgust at regimented gardeners and certain trees whose "suffocating pink froth... is seen foaming in the suburbs." Osler's unfettered and knowledgeable observations disclose an expansive approach to horticulture that exemplifies her point: "you don't have to garden to garden." (June)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Osler's plea is not so gentle; rather, itþs opinionated (though never dismissive), bell-clear, wickedly humorous, brilliant—a call for cultivated anarchy in the garden that turns an oxymoron into a sensuous, sensible act. "Why garden? God knows Damn those fine mornings. It's then that guilt seeps in like bad gas," groans Osler, one of England's best-known gardeners. Don't buy it for a minute. Her love of gardening is obvious, even if "a great number of gardening jobs are pure slog." And her garden, eclectically wanton as it is, enemy of everything regimented and overly neat, shot through with the native vitality of plants for atmosphere and mystery, brings her to her knees much of the time; untidiness requires work. She wouldn't have it any other way. She likes a rude edge, to blur and enchant, the unruly "quality that adds an extra sensory dimension." She loves hedges, walls, and paths—"the bones of a garden"—as long as they don't rob the garden of its sensuality. Here she offers not so much advice as the experience of her Shropshire garden: trees for their summer crowns and bare winter branches, stone for its texture and floral affinities, water for its attractiveness to humans and kingfishers and newts, bulbs for their individuality and scope. She's not tethered to flowers, but she loves them too ("who can go outside and kick a lily?"). Like her garden, Osler will not be confined, and she delights in moving off in many directions, to weather wars and the transporting quality of scent, botanical illustrations and the patron saints of gardening (Osler suggests a small figure of one in the garden "might be just as efficacious as a blast of Phostrogen"). Osler'sthinking is original, intuitive, and sharp as a tack; as a gardening writer she rightly sits up there with Henry Mitchell and Eleanor Perenyi.

Kirkus Reviews